“That is the question which hovers over all our heads like the sword of Themistocles.”
“Damocles,” said that classic scholar. “Somebody give her the pills?”
“Who knows.”
“She took them herself?”
“So I think, but the police have other ideas.”
“Like Paul Brexton giving them to her secretly?”
“Or someone else . . . though why the nonfatal four, I’ll never know. If he really wanted to do her in, I should think the usual dozen would have been in order.”
“It’s all a devious plot, Peter. Any fool can see it. She was going in swimming: what could be smarter than giving her something to make her groggy just as she got out in that awful undertow?”
“I can think of a lot of things which’d be smarter. Among them, ...” I slipped my arm around her again but she was extremely unresponsive.
“On the other hand, I don’t suppose there was any way of knowing for sure she would go in the water. Oh, isn’t it terribly exciting? and happening to Brexton too, of all people.”
“It will cause unpleasant talk,” I said, drawing her even closer to me: I smelled lilacs and the fresh warm odor of Liz.
“What on earth do you have in mind Peter?"
“It’s not in my mind. . .
“Filthy, brutish creatures ... all men are the same.”
“If you’d rather I'll get you a sixteen-year-old boy.”
“And what on earth would I do with one of those?" “Modesty impels me to draw a veil over. . .
“It’ll be in all the papers, won’t it?”
“What? the sixteen-year...”
“No, you idiot, Mrs. Brexton’s death."
“Well, of course...”
“Isn’t that just wonderful for you? that’s your job, isn’t it?” “I wasn't hired to handle Mrs. Brexton’s murder.” As I said this, I was suddenly startled by the implications. It was too wild . . . and yet mightn’t Mrs. Veering have suspected there’d be trouble and hired me in advance, just in case? She was the kind to look ahead: a combination Hetty Green and lush. The possibility that she might have been the one to ease her niece into a more beautiful world occurred to me then. Motive was obscure but then I didn’t know anybody’s motive . . . they were all strangers to me. Even so it was the kind of thing Mrs. Veering might do . . . she was both mad and methodical, an unusual combination. The thought was sobering.
Liz noticed my sudden thoughtfulness. “What're you thinking about? she asked. "Are you considering ways of seducing me?”
I snorted. “What is more ignoble than a woman? You have not the slightest sensual interest in the male, even in such a perfect specimen as myself, yet at all hours of the day and night you think about seduction...”
“And homemaking. A little two-room apartment in Peter Cooper Village. Birdseye products in the frigidaire . . .Clapp’s strained baby food on the shelf and a darling fat baby wetting itself periodically in a special fourteen ninety-five Baby-Leroy crib from Macy's.”
“My God, you are prepared for marriage!”
Liz smiled enigmatically. “We all are. Acutally, I’m doing a piece on the young married couple in New York City for one of the magazines, not Harper’s Bazaar. Something more middle-class. They want me to describe bliss on thirty-five dollars a week. You don’t know what a good wife I’ll make!”
“There's more to marriage than that.”
“Than thirty-five dollars? I suppose there is. I think I’d like someone very rich. But seriously, Peter, you don’t really believe Brexton killed his wife, do you? I mean it just isn’t the kind of thing that happens."
“I don’t know what to think.” This was my clearest statement so far, and the most accurate. I then swore her to secrecy and we went back inside.
Everyone was fairly tight. The very nicest people had gone home. Only one stag had been knocked down in the john (you may recall what happened to the late Huey Long in a Long Island men’s room some years ago); a husband and wife (another woman’s husband, another man’s wife) were locked tight together in a dim corner of the room. The college set, a particularly beautiful gang of sunburned animals, were singing songs and feeling each other happily while plotting their next move which, from what I overheard, was an all-out attack on Southampton. Already I could hear the crash of cars into solid objects, the tinkling of broken glass: youth!
And youth, in the congenial form of Liz Bessemer, was all mine that night. Her uncle and aunt had gone home. The various bucks who had been competing for her favors had either gone off with whatever available girls were on hand or had quietly passed out among the parked convertibles.
‘‘Let’s go to Montauk!” This brilliant idea came to Liz as we moved slowly around the dance floor, waltzing to a fox trot ... I have no sense of beat and, besides, only know how to waltz which I do fairly well to any music.
“Walking?”
“I’ll drive. I’ve got the car ... at least I think I have. Aunt went home in our house guest’s car ... I hope.”
Aunt had indeed gone home in the house guest’s car, leaving us a fine Buick with its top down.
She leaped into the driver’s seat and I relaxed beside her as we drove swiftly down the center of the long straight road which runs parallel to the dunes all the way to Montauk, Long Island’s sandy terminus.
The moon almost blinded us; it shone directly in our eyes. We stopped a long way before Montauk. At my direction, we turned off the road and drove down a sandy trail which ended in the Atlantic Ocean. Between two dunes, a mile from the nearest darkened house, we made love.
I’ve never seen such a night as that one. The sky was filled with all the stars available in that happy latitude while everywhere, in every part of the sky, meteors were falling.
When it was over, we lay side by side on the sand which was still faintly warm from the sun and we looked at the stars, the meteors and the moon. A salt breeze dried our naked bodies. She shivered and I put my arm under her and pulled her close . . . she was light in my arms.
“I ought to get back,” she said, her voice small, no longer teasing.
“Almost day." We thought about that for a while. She pulled herself up on her elbow and looked at me curiously in the moonlight. “What are you thinking about?” she asked.
“Nothing.”
“Tell me.”
“Nothing . . . except maybe how pleasant it is on the beach like this and how much I’ll hate having to get dressed again and go back to that house.”
She sighed and stretched. “It was nice, wasn’t it?”
I pulled her down on my chest and kissed her for answer; her small breasts tickled my skin. I was ready again even though at my age I’m officially past the peak but she sensed this and, instead, got to her feet and ran down to the water and dove in.
Remembering what had happened less than twenty-four hours before, I was scared to death. I leaped into the cold black water after her. Fortunately, she was a good swimmer and we kept well within the surf line. It was strange, swimming in that black ocean under a black sky . . . the moon and the beach white, and the tops of the waves, bright with phosphorus.
Then, shivering and laughing, we ran back to the car and dried ourselves with her aunt’ lap rug.
We both agreed that the other looked just fine with no clothes on and Liz admitted shyly to me that she got a minor thrill out of observing the male body in a state of nature if she liked the person who owned the body. I told her she was unnatural and might end up as a footnote in a textbook.
In a happy mood, we drove south and she let me off a few yards from the North Dunes just as daylight, gray and pink, smudged the east.